Email Marketing: The importance of lead nurturing in the complex B2B sale
While gathering presentation material for the upcoming MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 (February 7-10 at Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas), I had the chance to reach out to Jen Doyle, Senior Research Manager, MarketingSherpa, to get some additional background on lead re-engagement and nurturing.
Jen was the lead author of the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, and was very helpful in finding a couple of relevant charts for me, providing some additional comments on what this research means for B2B marketers.
73% of all B2B leads are not sales-ready
The first lesson Jen offers is almost three quarters of all B2B leads are not sales-ready. This means Marketing needs to engage with those leads in some fashion to move them down the buying funnel. This also means it’s possible for leads to “go cold” somewhere between entering the funnel and becoming sales-ready. Those are the leads Marketing needs to reengage with.
Here is the first chart of MarketingSherpa research Jen provided:
Chart: Average percentage of total lead volume that is sales-ready
Click to enlarge
And here is Jen’s commentary:
The above chart is the demonstration of why all leads cannot go directly to Sales.
At the time of original lead conversion, an average of 27% of those leads will be qualified to the point where they are ready and willing to engage with Sales.
The remaining 73% are not there yet. When these leads are prematurely sent over to Sales, they are not receiving the experience they desire and will look elsewhere for it.
Besides, do you really want your Sales team spinning their wheels making dial after dial where nearly three-quarters of those leads are not ready?
So, a large majority of B2B leads are not ready for Sales. This is where lead nurturing campaigns come into play.
The usual touch point for lead nurturing is email. These campaigns are greatly enhanced by utilizing marketing automation software to track and score those leads, and send triggered email based on demographic, firmographic, and probably most importantly as the lead moves closer to be becoming sales-ready, behavioral information. Behavioral information would include website visits, whitepaper downloads, webinar participation, and similar activities that indicate the lead is getting ready to buy the product or service.
With that in mind, this second chart is not good news for many B2B marketers:
